“But I’m not to go to school. Gradda says it is raining too hard and that she can’t think of allowing me to go out,” this plaintively.
“Oh well,” Winnie didn’t quite know what to say to this, for a Girl Scout to stay in for an ordinary rain was a situation she didn’t know how to deal with. “Chirk up, honey,” she said finally. “Practise some of your stunts for the next rally. I’ll come in this afternoon. Sorry you aren’t coming out. I shall miss you. Got to go off now. Good-bye.” And she hung up the receiver.
Winnie’s suggestion was a good one, for Joanne got out her manual and sat down by a window overlooking the rain-drenched street. As she watched schoolgirls hurrying by with books and umbrellas she heaved a deep sigh, then opened her little blue volume. The very first words that caught her eye were “A Girl Scout is Cheerful under all circumstances. Scouts never grumble at hardships, nor whine at each other, nor frown when put out.” The color rose to Joanne’s cheeks and she turned over the pages rapidly till she came to the one which set forth the qualifications for a Second Class Scout. These she considered carefully, then she threw down the book and went down-stairs humming a little tune and saying to herself: “A Scout goes about with a smile and singing.”
She found her grandmother in the library with her fancy work. “Gradda,” said Joanne, “how do you hem?”
“Why, my child, what do you mean?” returned Mrs. Selden looking up.
“Well, you see, Gradda, I’ve always hated sewing, haven’t I? and have said I would never take a needle in my hand if I could help it, and now that I want to be a Second Class Scout in a hurry, that is one of the things I have got to learn. I must know how to make a buttonhole, or knit or crochet, sew a seam or hem a garment. The hemming sounded sort of easy, and I thought I’d begin on that. Will you show me how?”
“Indeed I will,” replied Mrs. Selden with a gratified air; “sewing is a very ladylike accomplishment and I am delighted that you want to learn. You have always been so opposed to it that I have not insisted, as perhaps I should have done.”
“I suppose it will bore me to extinction,” responded Joanne, “but I mean to do it or die. When it gets to the point that I can’t stand it any longer I can fly at something else like the Morse alphabet or the semaphore one.”
So instead of spending the morning in a state of doleful dumps Joanne busied herself with a needle, and, though she did throw her work on the floor in a rage several times, at last she came to the point of being quite satisfied with her really presentable hem and decided that it was enough for one day.